If My Heart Had Wings

Aoi Minase is a young man whose dreams involved cycling and he was pretty good at it, even won the podium place in one of the competitions. But in one of the races, he had a serious knee injury which prevented him from following his passion. With his dreams shattered, depressed and with low spirit, he returned to his hometown, a small rural settlement that has prospered since he left.

Very soon Aoi finds himself cast into the role of a "dorm mother", running a girls dormitory in a mansion. Kotori Habane, the girl in a wheelchair he met earlier that day, is one of the girls living here as well. One day, Aoi strolled into an old looking garage and noticed a disassembled glider inside. He was not able to cycle anymore so he was looking for an alternative club activity, and this peeked his interest. What's more, Kotori, and his childhood girl friend, Ageha, also became interested in that club and they all became members. What seemed like a place of refuge after a huge defeat turned out not so bad after all, because returning to his hometown opened Aoi the door to new dreams, new relationships, and new adventures.

If My Heart Had Wings is a romantic visual novel that has all the explicit sex scenes edited in the Western release (unlike the initial release version in Japan). The game consists of static background images and static characters which have several pre-defined poses, facial expressions and outfits. Occasionally animations (more like static object moving, not animated), sliding backgrounds and comic-like mini-images enter the scene, and there are different times of day for all the locations, including daytime, dusk, night, and even animated rain.

Dialogues can be set for manual continuation or automatic one. All the in-game characters have full voice overs, but not the protagonist. Even some other options like saving or loading game feature voice acting. The transparency on the dialogue window can be adjusted, the lengthy dialogue log can be checked for any missed dialogues, and voiced out dialogues can be repeated, both currently viewed one or any from the log file. The game also has a variety of choices regarding gameplay window, in-game animations and many customizable shortcut keys and mouse gestures. The game does feature choice-selected branches in the story, but it will take many hours of gameplay until the first such choice appears and they are very rare throughout the game, especially until the game story moves halfway through.